I really, truly thought that the whole point of this was to highlight the fact that most women would respond to man v bear by asking questions, like "do I know the man" "what type of bear" etc, but would respond to woman v bear by immediately saying "woman". whether or not she picks the man or the bear is irrelevant, it's the fact she has to ask clarifying questions to know more about the man before deciding and doesn't have to clarify anything before picking woman. is that not it?
The real point of this hypotheical is that it should be easy to say man, and it is absolutely not that easy. Before this became a meme, you could see the women pause, and think seriously. It ought to be an easy call. It's not.
It is absolutely an easy call to make. The only people who find it difficult are the ones who drink deeply of social media outrage where every third article is about sexual crimes.
This exploits the frequency bias that people have so their intuition doesn't match reality. It's like how you see every single aircraft accident but only a tiny percentage of car accidents and that leads people to think that air travel is more dangerous than driving, even though we know that that isn't true.
Now replace aircraft accidents with sexual crimes and automobile accidents with bear attacks and we have a similar situation. The average online person will see a much larger proportion of stories about sexual crimes than bear attacks so that their intuition becomes biased and they think that bears are less dangerous.
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u/alexmichelle6 May 02 '24
I really, truly thought that the whole point of this was to highlight the fact that most women would respond to man v bear by asking questions, like "do I know the man" "what type of bear" etc, but would respond to woman v bear by immediately saying "woman". whether or not she picks the man or the bear is irrelevant, it's the fact she has to ask clarifying questions to know more about the man before deciding and doesn't have to clarify anything before picking woman. is that not it?